[Phil Roth]

Kevin,
Hopefully my comments were not viewed as criticism towards your efforts. I assumed the code was farmed out to some consultant and not written by a peer roboteer engineer. It may help if FIRST comes out with a simplified white paper explaining the I/O that's needed along with some tuning tips which are probably linked closely with mechanical dimensions. Naturally a lot of investigation and reverse engineering is left to students, but it may not be practical because of the new "stuff" like 'C' and only 6 short weeks to get it going along with the rest of the robot. Mount Olive Robotics Team (MORT) # 11 from New Jersey will have IR seeking as part of it's Autonomous mode.

From what I see by the code there are 4 IR sensors, each connecting to digital inputs used as Interrupts. It seems 2 sensors are mounted as pairs on the small servo. The code "hunts" for the IR signal recieved by each pair by moving the servo until a signal is locked on. The mechanical distance between the "pairs" mounted on the servo should be as large as possible to produce a large delta between them. When both pairs are "locked on", naturally there is a difference in the angle between pairs, and the delta is used as error information to steer the wheels.

We are going to start building the beacon and reciever this week and getting familiar with it. I hope you will be around for some help if needed, on the other hand if you think I can help in documenting anything for the students, making it easier to get this going, please let me know.

Thanks very much for your reply and the coding

Phil